“... Jean-Pierre Melville, ‘America is the sublime and the abominable.’Critics of American racism, class inequality and foreign policy have tended to focus on the abominable. ‘Two centuries ago,’ Frantz Fanon wrote in 1961, ‘a former European colony decided to catch up with Europe. It succeeded so well that the United States became a monster, in which ...”

“... to this dilemma. Co-opting Hegel’s language, he drew a distinction between people being a class ‘in themselves’, when they are seen to act in their objective material interests, and becoming a class ‘for themselves’, when they self-consciously recognise themselves as belonging to a collective. It is no ...”

“... her books are dramatised; Unity and Diana, the Nazis, are subjects for studies of British upper-class fascism; Debo, as she was always known, the châtelaine of Chatsworth, attracts the interest of architectural historians and fans of the aristocracy; Jessica, known as Decca, is the communist. Pamela, once satirised in Private Eye as ‘Doreen: the unknown ...”

“... Ronald Reagan left office more popular than any departing President since the end of World War Two. The same month Americans interviewed in a telephone poll achieved on a happiness scale the highest score in decades. Reagan’s popularity and American self-satisfaction have not risen together because of any general improvement in the standard of living: the rich are richer than they were a decade ago, the poor are poorer, and the average American stands about the same ...”

“... with the language of the old professions outranking that of the newer ones, aligns with the class system; in this hierarchy the jargon with the highest status is the Queen’s English. The attitudes of Hudson’s reviewers have become a part of the content of Walter Nash’s book. It is pleasing that a scholar so commonsensically frustrated by modern ...”

“... just a little uncanny. Most of the mayhem transpires within families or between neighbours, and class conflict is often the animating force. The settings are only glimpsed, and language does the job of making the goings-on strange: in ‘The Semplica Girl Diaries’, it’s the father’s voice in diary form, his clipped syntax eliding subjects and articles ...”

“... intellectuals were formerly supposed to carry. What is an intellectual? Intellectuals are not a class; they are not by definition significantly political (though the Russians once thought they were); they can’t be relied on to speak truth to power – but they must be something. Collini finds little to interest him in two of the three modern senses of the ...”

“... and of the need for an era of honour after so many years of moaning and lamentation. Class politics also come into it. As Fawaz Gerges observes in his history of Islamic State, al-Qaida’s leadership has in large part been drawn from the elite and professional classes. Islamic State is more of a working-...”

“... to try to say, I ask you to join Iris and me, crossing Devon on a motorbike not long after the war. Empty roads, no crash-helmets. We were going too fast and indulging our childish habit of throwing high-sounding philosophical phrases at each other. (I think this was a hint taken from John Buchan’s autobiography, where he links stretches of countryside ...”

“... Oxford had been followed by a seismic controversy over his book on the origins of the Second World War. I half expected to find a smell of fire and brimstone in the air, and my knees were knocking together as I climbed the last few steps to his rooms in the New Buildings at Magdalen. But there was only the aroma of his pipe tobacco, and some brisk advice on ...”

“... was about. Taylor’s Bismarck, his Habsburg Monarchy and his famous Origins of the Second World War are all classics, which are regularly reprinted and which have something fresh to say each time you look at them. He was and is a wonderful lecturer. He has combined all of this with a journalistic sideline that would have occupied other men full-time. And ...”

“... than ‘stately’. Clough’s personal battle for demotic regional styles was soon to become a war – with council after council, county after county, and eventually with government – over minimum standards for all council housing. And although I see that both Richard Haslam and Jonah Jones credit him with authorship of the splendidly ...”

“... of 1915, a disaster in every way, was dreamed up after Turkey sided with Germany in the Great War. Churchill’s cunning plan was to cut through the ghastly stalemate of the Western Front with a morale-boosting attack where Germany expected it least. The idea was to force open the straits between the Aegean and the Sea of Marmara, get to ...”

“... the world, there are still a few reminders of the fact that, between the 1880s and the First World War, Germany, like other major European powers, possessed an overseas colonial empire. If you go to Windhoek in Namibia, you can still pick up a copy of the Allgemeine Zeitung, a newspaper which caters for the remaining German-speaking residents of the town. If ...”

“... the reputation of Haig was bound up that of the entire British High Command in the First World War, if not that of the British Army itself and the governing classes from which its senior officers were largely drawn. After the Somme and Passchendaele no one could claim that all was entirely well: but once the war was over ...”